He turned the volume down again as Julie spoke.
“It’s not true,” she said.
“What?”
“The report. The CDC can’t mobilize that many quarantines that fast. They’re just not set up for it. And FEMA… There’s just no way.”
“At least they’re doing something,” Ben said.
“What? What could they possibly be doing?” Julie asked, her voice growing emotional. “Stephens kept me in the dark the entire time, and he murdered the man who’s supposed to be at the front of this thing, keeping the investigation moving forward.”
“Okay, well what do you want to do, then?” Ben asked. He slowed the truck.
Julie thought for a moment. “We’re it, Ben. We’re the only people close enough to do anything about it. We’ve got to find that bomb, and fast. And don’t get any ideas about ditching me on the side of the road somewhere.”
Ben looked at her for a minute, considering the offer. He nodded, then sped up again.
Chapter Forty-Seven
“How many potholes are on these roads?” Julie asked. “I’m seriously thinking about getting out and walking.”
Ben smiled, for a moment forgetting the massive predicament they were in. “You know, you’ve got a fantastic ability to ignore the present circumstances and joke around.”
She shot him a look. “You think I’m joking?” She made a show of readjusting herself on her seat, wincing in mock pain.
“Sorry,” he said, shrugging. “I’m trying to stay off the larger park roads — it should be abandoned, but we can’t be too careful. Just hang on;, the lake’s coming up in a few minutes.”
She groaned, but didn’t argue. Instead, she opened her laptop and connected to the wireless internet tethered from her cellphone. For a few minutes, she checked for new emails, updates on the spreading virus, and sent a few emails up the chain of command at the CDC. They both knew it was a long shot, as the CDC was already doing everything they could to stop the spread of the virus, and their ability to provide research support had been extremely stifled by Stephens’ work before. After a few minutes of clicking around, she closed the computer.
“Try calling again?” Ben asked.
“There’s no point,” she replied. “Anyone there is already deployed at a waypoint or helping with disaster relief. We need to get to an actual location, then —”
“Julie, we’ve talked about this,” Ben said. “We can’t risk it. Like you just said, most of your teams are going to have already been deployed, or will be. And we don’t have the time to drive all the way there.”
“I know, I know,” Julie said, exasperated. “It’s just… frustrating. I feel so helpless. I’ve always been the person to rush in, take charge, you know?”
Ben smiled from the side of his mouth. “I do know. And what we’re trying to do out here is much more helpful than just driving to a CDC branch and talking to the office staff. There’s nothing that needs to happen back there yet. Let’s get this bomb taken care of, and we can go from there.”
“But how do we even know where the bomb is?”
“It’s under the lake,” Ben answered, his voice confident. As he said the words, a sign flew past on the right side of the road with the words “Yellowstone Lake — 1 Mile” printed on it.
“Ben, Livingston’s already checked there. Remember? He sent a team of geologists and excavators through most of the caves in the region, and found that tunnel. If there was something there, he would have —”
“Julie, Livingston didn’t tell you that.”
“He did! He called, and —” she suddenly remembered what Ben was hinting at.
Livingston hadn’t called — Stephens had.
She bolted upright in the seat. “Stephens called, not Livingston. He only said Livingston had sent the team in, and he didn’t have any reason to be communicating with Livingston, which means…” She thought for a moment. “Which means he was lying. Ben, if he was lying, we could be heading in the wrong direction.”
“But we’re not. We’re going exactly where Stephens told us to go. So far he’s double-crossed us at every step, but it’s been his information that’s gotten us this far. He even told us why — he wanted to watch us try to figure it out.” Ben looked at Julie. “If that bomb is actually somewhere in Yellowstone, we’re going to find it exactly where Stephens told us to look.”
Julie knew he was right — it had to be right. “Yeah, why wouldn’t he just tell us exactly where it is? As insane as he was, he believed it was too late to do anything anyway.”
She hoped Stephens wasn’t right about that.
“So where is this cave, anyway?” she asked.
Ben shook his head. “I don’t know. But there’s only one cave I can think of that’s long and deep enough to be a good spot. It has to be close enough to the surface that an explosion would penetrate, but deep enough to affect the magma area below the caldera. It’s a few miles around the lake, once we get there, but the cave isn’t terribly long.”
“But he cut a tunnel into the side of it, right?”
“Right, and we have no way of knowing how deep that is. But it’s wide enough that we can crouch or slide most of the way through, and there aren’t any major forks. We’ll know right away if we see a manmade tunnel.”
Ben pulled the truck to the left as the road took a dogleg turn, then he sped up again. This section of the road was considerably better than the one they’d been on, with a gravel base and fewer potholes and bumps. As he aimed the vehicle down the center of the one-lane drive, he couldn’t help but notice the immense beauty of the surrounding country.
This land had been his only home for over a decade. Diana — his mother — had tried for years to bring him and his brother together again under one roof, but she’d failed.
Or, rather, he’d failed her.
After his father died, Ben did the only thing that felt right. He ran away. At the time it hadn’t felt like running away, though, as much as it felt like running toward something. This something was staring down at him as he drove through it.
The trees, pine and spruce, scraping at the ceiling of the sky, their tops ripping into the vast blue and white. The forest floor, which had acted as his bed for so many nights he couldn’t count them, and the soft prickle of the needles that littered the ground and crunched when he walked.
And the smell.
That forest, deep-green, fresh, alive smell.
The smell was the biggest reason he’d settled here, and he swore he’d never live another day without it. Whether it was a mountaintop in Colorado, the sweeping forests of Yellowstone, or his secluded cabin in Alaska, as long as that smell was there when he arrived, he could live anywhere.
But it saddened him that he wasn’t there now — home — wherever it was. Even though he was in his own backyard, driving like a madman over roads he was intimately familiar with, he wasn’t truly home.
He wasn’t sure what was missing, what had changed.
He looked again at Julie and saw her gazing back at him.
What’ was missing?
The question rose again.
What’ was missing?